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This book is about how to run services, in any organisation, in any industry. It describes the basics, the core stuff, in realistic pragmatic terms. And it is pragmatically brief - we kept it to 50 paperback pages.

Recent Comments

A few of our wealthier readers might now consider ITIL Live™

I see the price of TSO's ITIL Live™ has fallen even further, in fact halved AGAIN. Since the £495 per annum fee now includes ITIL V3 Lifecycle Suite content - i.e. you get an online subscription to the books included in the price (normally £265 p.a. ) - some readers may now judge it worth considering, especially if the boss is paying. Quite a cut from the original £2,500!

Note also that this seems to be the new standard price, not just some introductory first-year deal. But check that!

Don't even THINK about telling the boss of the official corporate rate of one concurrent access for £2,670 - that is still nuts. Just put up a business case for one individual sub. Even if three or four staff subscribe you are still ahead on the deal, and how many companies have more than one or two who need to be ITIL gurus?

Personally I made the call way back that buying new printed books every couple of years was cheaper and more convenient than an online subscription so ITIL Live still does nothing for me, but if you want the online books then the overall package looks better now.

The remaining amount after you discount the cost of the books is still a lot. Any online portal for £240 p.a. is a bit brisk in the 21st Century. Imagine what TSO could sell advertising for on a site like that. They could do paid product reviews and other brand placement. They could sell discrete items for small increments, e.g. papers, templates... As a webpreneur I can attest that getting you buggers to pay for ANYTHING is a challenge, but certainly the business model of an upfront wallop just doesn't wash with the contemporary online consumer. Open it up, get the traffic, and then cash in.

And if you do sign up, we're all still waiting to know what you think.

Comments

So I've been involved with ITIL for some years now. I've had an ITIL Live membership for a few months and have to say, I'm not impressed. Okay, first I'll admit I'm writing this comment after a terse email to their customer service so yes, I'm still pissed off.

The objective: The site has all the process and funtions covered, however the content is very light with documents that look like they were hastily posted so they could get a site up. Not much real content there. You'd think with the number of people in ITIL now they could get some very good real world implementation examples? You can get the same info they have posted reading the OGC books for an hour. I emailed them with feedback and links to the MANY spelling errors I encountered in process headings and other areas. Every web development tool I've used has spell check built in. The site is slow. NEVER good for an online service. I attempted to log in today and got the message I had a previous session active and I should try again in 30 minutes? What? Are they kidding me? NEVER have I had an account that told me to come back in 30 minutes. Is that best practice? At the very minimum, a logon should terminate any previous session. Ridiculous.

The subjective: It seems to me to be a hasty effort to compete with Pink Elephant's PinkAtlas. Major spelling errors in process names? Really? Downright sloppy at best. I have a corporate membership to PinkAtlas and it's like night and day. Detailed templates and flow charts available. Site is fairly fast as well.

I've told them (ITIL Live) that unless some monumental changes occur before my membership is up, they can be sure of at least one thing: They'll be minus one customer next year. So to sum it up, if you're a serious practitioner of ITIL or someone who's trying to get certified...or...hell...if you're anyone, stay away from ITIL Live.

TSO is offfering free trials so I had a look. The content is very light, a few clickable process graphs but not access to the books. The list of experts is weak, just Sharon and two other unheard-of ladies. The news are old, top news was from March (this year). The testimonials are sad, written by the authors etc. A lot of content seems to be links to free stuff. There was one slightly interesting article in the toolkit but I had seen it before!

The interesting article was David Wheeldon on Service Strategy. He writes: "Ironically, the first two terms – ‘Business Strategy’ and ‘IT Strategy’ – are not used in the Service Strategy publication. Perhaps, understandably, the authors wanted to avoid using them so as not to imply that there was a void between the business and IT. While it may be ultimately beneficial if Business Strategy and IT Strategy are synonymous (particularly where the organization is an IT vendor or supplier), in reality many organizations have not reached that stage and may never do so due to business diversity, geography, cultures, etc."

There is a problem here. The £495 per annum fee is for individuals. It is limited to a single machine and cannot be transferred for use by others. It can only be used by the person who is authorised on the contract.